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Around 1995 I had a Zoom VFX V.32bis 14.4k modem as my main workhorse. It was a white plastic shell with a smoky brown translucent front face. I decided to buy one recently for old times sake:

Zoom VFX V.32 bis 14,400 bps fax modem

I also came into possession of a Telebit Netblazer PN (which I need to finish working on and write up about it), which lead me to searching for manuals and more information about it. I stumbled across this eBay listing for a Telebit Teleblazer:

Telebit TeleBlazer V.34 modem

It’s the exact same case! Back, front, shell, underneath, face, font of the V.32bis / V.34 badge, it’s all the same! In one photo of I think the box it mentioned being based on a Rockwell chipset too. Previous Telebit modems such as the Txxxx series, Worldblazer, all had their own blocky look. At first I thought the seller had the wrong modem, but after looking at the pictures it’s very much a Telebit branded product with “Telebit TeleBlazer” on the bottom. Funnily there was one auction for $250 and another for $18 for the same kind of TeleBlazer.

This lead me to do even more digging. My Zoom VFX V.32bis was made by Zoom Telephonics Inc in 1991-1992 or so. It’s based on the Rockwell RC144DP data pump. There’s also another VFX V.32bis with a different solid, slant-front, white case that came out later I think because it was used in their later 28.8k, 33.6k and 56k models. I’ve only seen the translucent brown plastic case on VFX 14.4k modems, never anything newer.

Telebit was well renown for producing modems with fast transfers ahead of their time using their own modulation system and throwing a Motorola 68000 at it for processing oomph. The Netblazer I have has a modem chip produced by AT&T. Apparently around 1993 Telebit was trying to put out a V.34 modem like everyone else and just decided to buy Octocom Systems, who was developing their own V.34 modem. Telebit also wanted to put out their own low-cost V.34 modem to compete, so I’m guessing that’s probably how they wound up using a Rockwell chipset.

What’s interesting is that Zoom Telephonics Inc was based in Boston, MA in 1992. Octocom Systems was based in Wilmington, MA, about 15 miles outside of Boston. Did proximity have anything to do with this case story? Were there ex-Zoom employees who went over to Octocom and took their case design with them? Did Zoom sell a bunch of pallets of leftover cases to Ocotocom or Telebit? Did Zoom and Telebit share the same ODM and Telebit said gimme the cheapest case you got and ship it?

I never did find any interesting stories or gossip to explain why they used the same case. I’d also be curious to tear open a Telebit TeleBlazer to see if it even uses something like the Rockwell RC288 datapump, which everyone seemed to be using by then. But I’m not $40 curious to buy one. Further, if their V.34 modems are based Rockwell chip, is there any Telebit magic left in there, or it just a Telebit sticker on the box?

Also, I’m not getting any good nostalgic memories of this VFX modem I bought, it’s been a dog. In my testing it fails to connect a lot of the time and locks up. I don’t know if it’s because the components are aged or if this thing got damaged somehow. The modem speaker only has one sound, LOUD, no matter if I use ATM1L0 or ATM1L3. The owners manual for the VFX V.32bis can be found over on archive.org (ZV32BIS.ZIP), it has some interesting subtleties such as only MNP enabled out of the box and you have to go find the command to enable V.42/V.42bis/LAPM support. For whatever reason even if the connection is using MNP5, the DC/EC lights on the front don’t come on, you have to be using V.42/V.42bis before they light up. Fortunately it’s data compression is in hardware, it’s not one of those janky Rockwell RPI chipsets that required a driver to punt EC/DC off to the PC’s CPU. I had completely forgotten those cheap bastards existed.

Custom aux/roll/null/DCD cable

This is part of the project to connect my Wildcat! BBS to a retro X.25 network, but it also applies more broadly to “reverse telnet” operation of a Cisco router where you telnet/ssh to a router at a given port to access a serial device hanging off of the aux or a terminal line. I don’t think there’s a lot of people seeking this solution, but I’m writing about it for when I eventually forget. This post mainly covers the serial connection and Cisco bits, I’m still clueless about the whole X.25 part.

This isn’t quite as simple as slapping a null modem cable between a serial port on the BBS machine and the aux port on the router, altho that’s part of it and would work. The problem is gracefully disconnecting the reverse telnet/SSH session when the visitor is done so the next person can log in. This is done to improve user experience and increase line availability.

Normally when using a reverse telnet session, it’s expected that a user send a ^] to close the telnet connection or a Ctrl-Shift-6 to break out. Until a the user sends a break/escape or a session-timeout happens, nobody else can use this BBS line. And it’s just not a good experience to tell somebody who’s gone to all the effort to connect to your board to oh yeah do this extra step too please. In the worst case this probably means somebody could tailgate in on the end of last person’s session somehow.

TL;DR:

  • Aux cable + modem adapter (with pin 1 and 6 DTR/DCD connected)+ null modem adapter + gender changers
  • “line aux 0” set to “modem printer”
  • chat script to send a string
  • BBS software configured to see said string and start a call, not “auto-answer”

Wildcat! is an MS-DOS program (at least the 4.x version I’m using) that is designed to use RS-232 serial ports to talk to a modem. The manual does discuss connecting to an X.25 PAD, namely a Microtronics CSI-X.25 PAD, so non-modem serial (i.e. using a direct, null modem cable) usage is expected to work.

Wildcat! and probably most BBS software expects to “answer” a serial line and sending a login prompt to the visitor in one of three ways: “auto answer”, detect when the RS-232 CD (carrier detect) line is raised; “ring detect”, detect when RS-232 RI (ring indicate) is raised; and “ring result”, look for specific text strings such as ‘RING’ to indicate an incoming call from a modem. In the latter two cases, Wildcat! will send an “ATA” command to the modem to answer the call. After that, in all cases Wildcat! expects to see a CD signal on the serial port which tells it there’s an active user on the line. If CD is abruptly dropped, Wildcat! will assume the caller has disappeared and will “hang up” its side. If the visitor selects “Goodbye” from the menu screen, Wildcat! will send the DTR (data terminal ready) line low briefly, which is intended to tell the modem to disconnect.

Normally if you connect a PC serial port to a BBS PC serial port with a direct null modem cable, with Wildcat! configured to auto-answer, then start a communications program such as Qmodem, Qmodem will raise DTR as it’s a terminal that’s now ready to process I/O. Wildcat! will see this and immediately send a login prompt to the terminal. However, if somebody logs into the BBS and selects the “Goodbye” menu option to leave, Wildcat! will wrap up the call and get ready for the next caller — in this case with our hardwired connection, in the Qmodem terminal window we’ll immediately see another login prompt. It’s not until Qmodem is exited that Wildcat! finally resets and waits for the next user. (Or you yank the serial cable from the PC).

BBS null modem / X.25 PAD connection

The Wildcat! Sysop Guide really only refers to a one other serial port configuration that doesn’t involve modems, that’s for for hooking up an X.25 PAD. This would allow users to come in via X.25 network such a Telenet or Tymnet, go through the PAD, which acts as a basic terminal server connected to the BBS via multiple serial cables. Which is kind of convenient for me since this is ultimately what I want to do, but with different hardware. If you wanted to configure the BBS to accept connections from something via null modem or a terminal server, you’d have to pick through this section and pull out the bits that look relevant.

The important part of this section of the manual are the details needed to build a wcMODEM .MDM modem profile file to use for the node that’ll be used for the direct connections. For example, creating a file called like DIRECT.MDM with the specified serial port info, options, and removing the modem commands. Then in the batch file that starts the Wildcat! instance for that node, add in a “WCMDM=DIRECT” to have it load the profile for that node.

I looked up the Microtronix CSI-X.25 PAD mentioned in the manual to get an idea of how it actually handed off serial connections. At the bottom of this post I’ve added some details about the history that I could find, I wasn’t able to find any manuals. Apparently the CSI-X.25 is a box with a number of DB-25 RS-232 ports off the back. It says the PAD is configured to “act like a modem that is in auto answer mode .. simply raises carrier detect (CD) when a call comes in”. It mentions other things here like it supports RTS/CTS hardware flow control, and probably running the serial lines at 9600 or 19200 bps. I’m going to go on a limb and assume it probably supports all serial pins, for example it knows when Wildcat! drops DTR to end the session.

It’s worth mentioning MSI did internally support another terminal server setup. For BBS Direct offered by Concentric, I’m told there was a Xylogics terminal server that received callers via IP/frame relay, and handed off via stack of serial cables to the MSI HQ BBS. I guess they made it all work with their BBS software out of the box.

Cisco operations

You can connect the aux port or an async serial breakout cable from a Cisco router to the serial port of a BBS as well. This could be used to provide inbound telnet/ssh connectivity to a MS-DOS BBS that has no concept of TCP/IP. What I’ve discovered is it’s not great when a user ends their session. It’s the same problem as a PC null modem connection, as soon as the user says “goodbye”, Wildcat! ends their session, and gets ready for the next caller. Except Wildcat! can’t drop the serial connection, you’ll see it eventually sending ++++ ATH0 AT&C1D1 commands desperately trying to get rid of the caller and blindly initializing a modem. Then another login prompt is sent.

As mentioned, until a the user sends a break/escape or a session-timeout happens, nobody else can use this BBS line.

What needs to happen is two things: 1) When the session first starts, the Cisco needs to raise DTR to activate the line and raise CD so Wildcat! knows there’s a visitor there. 2) when a visitor says “goodbye” to the BBS, the Cisco needs to see DTR being temporarily lowered by Wildcat! as a signal to boot the reverse telnet session.

Cabling

This setup only works on the aux port or terminal lines via WIC or NM card. To make any of this work start with the serial cable being used. Cisco used to ship along with their baby blue console cables two adapters, a RJ-45/8P8C to DB-9 “terminal” adapter for connecting a PC to the console port for initial configuration, and a RJ-45/8P8C to DB-25 “modem” adapter for connecting a modem to the console or aux port. The difference between the two is the “terminal” adapter took care of setting up a null modem connection (i.e. crossing RX/TX) for you, however the DCD and RI pins are completely left unconnected as they’re not needed. The “modem” adapter is straight through, but connects DCD to DTR, but only comes in DB-25 form.

Apologies: As an aside it’s maddening following pins that get rolled from the aux port to the Cisco blue roll (not Ethernet crossover) cable to the various adapters. It gets confusing to me which signal to talk about too, since they’re all ultimately wired together — do I say pin 6, or do I say DSR or DTR? So if I say DSR and probably mean DTR signal, forgive me.

You’ll either need to use the DB-25 modem adapter in addition to a null modem adapter, and probably a gender changer too somewhere, or edit the DB-9 terminal adapter to add a DCD pin. This turns into quite a stack of connectors. For this experiment my BBS only has DB-9 serial ports coming out the back, so I wound up making my own combo roll + DB-9 + null modem + add DCD cable. I imagine with the newer Cisco console cables that have a molded DB-9 adapter attached, you’ll need a null and a way to fix DCD.

Remember, Wildcat! expects DCD to be up so we have to have that pin connected to something. Only using RI won’t work either, while that may signal that there’s a new connection, Wildcat! still requires DCD afterwards.

It remains to be seen what kind of adapters are needed to do this for something like a CAB-OCTAL-ASYNC from a NM-16A.

Believe it or not, all of these cable combos below do the same thing. Mine is much simpler and prettier but I don’t want to solder more connectors like it.

My ultimate awesome Aux RJ-45 + roll + null + DTR/CD DB-9 cable

A roll cable, DB-25 adapter, gender changer, DB 9/25, cable and a null oh my

Another abomination

My awesome cable pinout, using a regular RJ-45 Ethernet cable, chop off one end and connect as follows (ignore all the labels and just pay attention to the pin numbers):

RJ-45  (Aux)   -  DB-9
1 w/o  (RTS)   -  pin 8 (CTS)
2 o    (DTR)   -  pin 6 (DSR, pin 6 also jumpered to pin 1)
3 g/w  (TXD)   -  pin 2 (RXD)
4 bl   (GND)   -  pin 5 (GND)
5 bl/w (GND)   -  pin 5 (GND, blues are grounds, connect together)
6 g    (RXD)   -  pin 3 (TXD)
7 br/w (DSR)   -  pin 4 (DTR)
8 br   (CTS)   -  pin 7 (RTS)
-n/a-          -  pin 1 (jumpered to pin 6)

Plug directly into aux port of router.

Aux port configuration

TL;DR: Through much trial and error I settled on configuring my aux port as “modem printer” and “script connection RINGRING” which I’ll explain why.
Cisco IOS provides a variety of options for setting up the aux port for serial operations, and there’s a whole document describing modem signal and line states. Here’s a document for aux pinouts too.

vintage-gw2(config)#line aux 0
vintage-gw2(config-line)#modem ?
  CTS-Alarm       Alarm device which only uses CTS for call control
  DTR-active      Leave DTR low unless line has an active incoming connection or EXEC
  Dialin          Configure line for a modern dial-in modem
  Host            Devices that expect an incoming modem call
  InOut           Configure line for incoming AND outgoing use of modem
  Printer         Devices that require DSR/CD active
  always-on       Configure line for a modern always-on modem
  answer-timeout  Set interval between raising DTR and CTS response
  autoconfigure   Automatically configure modem on line
  dtr-delay       Set interval during which DTR is held low
  onhold          Set the V.92 modem on hold timer duration

vintage-gw2(config-line)#

Ideally we need a config option that does /something/ different on the serial line when a reverse telnet session is started, that way we have signal (a literal electrical signal) to the BBS that there’s a new visitor on the line. Then we could wire that up to DCD so that pin is alive when there’s a reverse telnet session in progress. Also we do not care at all about “inbound” or “exec” sessions, that’s for something connecting TO the Cisco from a serial port.

I’ve gone through every single one of these options with an RS-232 LED breakout and there are exactly two options, “modem Host” and “modem DTR-active” that actually change state. They raise/lower pin 6 for DTR. Normally it’s low/off, but when a remote telnet session comes in, DTR is raised. All other pins 4, 7, 8 all stay the same. One would assume they could connect pin 6 to pin1 so that when DTR is raised it also raises DCD, and Wildcat! could be set up to auto-answer. While that is technically true and does get the visitor to the BBS, it doesn’t solve our original problem of graceful session endings.
I did find other people sell Cisco DB-9 connectors with DSR/DTR connected to DCD (pin 1 and 6), so I’m not crazy in imagining this need.

Nice, but this isn’t the problem we’re trying to solve!

Bye bye bye

Now we need a way to signal back from the BBS to the Cisco that the session is ended, the serial line has been dropped, go disconnect the reverse telnet session.
When a person does “goodbye” from Wildcat!, Wildcat! lowers DTR from the BBS side. When connected to a null modem adapter, this means DSR on the Cisco side changes — except when using “modem Host” or “modem DTR-active” nothing is paying attention to DSR! The Cisco has no idea Wildcat! is telling it the user has hung up and keeps DTR high.

The only option I found is “modem Printer“. Apparently there used to be an option called “modem cts-active” that got replaced by “modem Printer“, but “modem Printer” isn’t really documented in the Modem Signal and Line States document. Anyways IOS says “modem printer” is “Devices that require DSR/CD active“. That’s exactly what we want here, when Wildcat! lowers DTR, it lowers DSR on the Cisco side and yeets the reverse telnet session!

But, this conflicts with our previous step in that with “modem printer” our DTR and thus CD is always asserted! Wildcat! will not be able to auto-answer and we’ll never get a new caller!

RINGRING banana phone

With “modem printer” configured on the aux port to gracefully disconnect visitors, and our DCD line is hardwired to be constantly active, we need another way to signal to Wildcat! that there’s an inbound caller.

What I did here was configure Wildcat! to use “ring result” and gave it a completely made up string to look for, “RINGRING“.

wcMODEM .MDM file for my fake X.25 PAD

Made up RINGRING string

Then on the Cisco side, I configured a simple “chat-script RINGRING "" RINGRING“, and on the aux port, “script connection RINGRING“.

Now when a reverse telnet session starts up, the Cisco sends the text “RINGRING” down the serial port. Wildcat! sees this and answers the line, all transparent to the user. The visitor can use the BBS all they want, I even tested this downloading a 10 MB file with Ymodem and it all worked.

Along with the right cable and aux settings, then when the user says goodbye from the BBS, their reverse telnet session gets gracefully disconnected.

For whatever reason this is not completely perfect, both the Cisco and Wildcat! seem to be trying to fiddle with serial lines for several seconds before things settle down and the next visitor can log in. But it’s a heck of a lot better than what it was!

Final Cisco config:

!
chat-script RINGRING "" RINGRING
!
line aux 0
 session-timeout 5
 no motd-banner
 script connection RINGRING
 modem answer-timeout 5
 modem Printer
 rotary 1
 no exec
 transport input pad telnet ssh
 autohangup
 stopbits 1
 speed 38400
 flowcontrol hardware
!

It also has the nice benefit that if the BBS is down or if a visitor is already using the BBS, the Cisco sends a “Connection refused” instead of black-holing the caller into nothingness of an empty session. I tried setting up some sort of “connection in use, try again later” thing, but doesn’t work like this.

For whatever reason I have the .MDM file set up to force “yes this is a reliable connection give me Ymodem/G” option, but it doesn’t take effect. I tried configuring the Cisco to send something like “FAKELAPM” as a string to tell Wildcat! it supported error correction and enable it, or send “VMP” to pretend it’s an OS/2 virtual modem, but neither worked. Oh well.

This is what the aux port looks while idle:

vintage-gw2#show line aux 0
   Tty Line Typ     Tx/Rx    A Modem  Roty AccO AccI  Uses  Noise Overruns  Int
      1    1 AUX  38400/38400 - printer   1    -    -   142     34 1786/5780   -

Line 1, Location: "", Type: ""
Length: 24 lines, Width: 80 columns
Baud rate (TX/RX) is 38400/38400, no parity, 1 stopbits, 8 databits
Status: Ready, No Exit Banner, CTS Raised, Modem Signals Polled
Capabilities: EXEC Suppressed, Hardware Flowcontrol In,
  Hardware Flowcontrol Out, Modem CTS-Required, Hangup on Last Close
  MOTD Banner Suppressed
Modem state: Ready
Modem hardware state: CTS* DSR*  DTR RTS
Rotary address 51010000
Special Chars: Escape  Hold  Stop  Start  Disconnect  Activation
                ^^x    none   -     -       none
Timeouts:      Idle EXEC    Idle Session   Modem Answer  Session   Dispatch
               00:10:00       00:05:00                       none     not set
                            Idle Session Disconnect Warning
                              never
                            Login-sequence User Response
                             00:00:30
                            Autoselect Initial Wait
                              not set
Modem type is unknown.
Session limit is not set.
Time since activation: never
Editing is enabled.
History is enabled, history size is 20.
DNS resolution in show commands is enabled
Full user help is disabled
Allowed input transports are pad telnet ssh.
Allowed output transports are pad telnet rlogin lapb-ta mop v120 ssh.
Preferred transport is telnet.
Shell: enabled
Shell trace: off
No output characters are padded
No special data dispatching characters

And this is what it looks like with a user on (not much difference):

vintage-gw2#show line aux 0
   Tty Line Typ     Tx/Rx    A Modem  Roty AccO AccI  Uses  Noise Overruns  Int
*     1    1 AUX  38400/38400 - printer   1    -    -   143     34 1786/5780   -

Line 1, Location: "", Type: "SCREEN"
Length: 59 lines, Width: 174 columns
Baud rate (TX/RX) is 38400/38400, no parity, 1 stopbits, 8 databits
Status: Ready, Connected, Active, No Exit Banner, CTS Raised
  Modem Signals Polled
Capabilities: EXEC Suppressed, Hardware Flowcontrol In,
  Hardware Flowcontrol Out, Modem CTS-Required, Hangup on Last Close
  MOTD Banner Suppressed
Modem state: Ready
Modem hardware state: CTS* DSR*  DTR RTS
Rotary address 51010000
Special Chars: Escape  Hold  Stop  Start  Disconnect  Activation
                ^^x    none   -     -       none
Timeouts:      Idle EXEC    Idle Session   Modem Answer  Session   Dispatch
               00:10:00       00:05:00                       none     not set
                            Idle Session Disconnect Warning
                              never
                            Login-sequence User Response
                             00:00:30
                            Autoselect Initial Wait
                              not set

 

Microtronix CSI-X.25 PAD

Cableshare Inc X.25 Data Concentrator

The PAD that’s mentioned in the Wildcat! has definitely been lost to time. I can find very little about this, no manuals, and maybe a couple of times it was for sale 30 years ago. Doing some sleuthing apparently it was originally made by Cableshare Inc. in London, Ontario as the “X.25 Data Concentrator”, and then starts showing up as the Microtronix CSI-X.25, who is also based in London, Ontario. I’m assuming CSI == Cableshare Inc.   I found exactly two articles even talking about it, an IEEE Communications Magazine “New Products” article from March 1984 that has the only photo of it, and a Computerworld from December 12, 1983 announcing it at $2,700 per port for a four port config. Sounds like off the back it had up to 16 DB-25 ports for connecting to thing.

So if you see one or its manuals, send it my way! Microtronix is still around, looks like they did a couple more X.25 devices, but have long left it behind.

Macintosh SE

I think I may have used a classic Macintosh once in my life, at a Kinko’s copy location of all places. We didn’t have them in school, we went from Commodore CBMs, to Apple IIe, to IBM PC 8088 clones. At the ISP I borrowed a customer’s PowerBook overnight so I could get experience with System 8 and to write how-to instructions for setting up dial-up accounts. It was nice but I didn’t bite. By 2003 when I finally bought my first Mac, a PowerBook G4, I started off on OS X.

At VCF I was playing with some of the classic macs on display and later saw some at the consignment sale. I thought why not, I am an adult, I can buy one if I want to. (Which is how I wound up buying USR Courier modems). I knew literally nothing about classic Macs, quickly googling what the difference between an SE, a Classic, and a 128k. I decided on an SE, it had an Asante Ethernet card, it seemed like a good deal so now I own an SE.

After getting home and using it, I quickly learned about the 800k floppy drives in them and I had nothing that could write disks for it. I was beginning to wish I had held out for a SE/30 with a FDHD, but here we are. It had 800k floppies of System 6 and the ethernet card driver, that was it. This is where I learned about BlueSCSI and using SCSI Zip drives to copy files to it, so I ordered an external BlueSCSI.

The next day at VCF I was browsing the sales again and this time there was a IIsi for sale, I think for like $30. I kinda wanted a color mac but learned the classic compacts didn’t have color. The small form factor won me over, it was running System 7, had a 1 GB hard drive in it, and another Ethernet card. I could at least stick it somewhere and it wouldn’t take a lot of space.

 

Macintosh IIsi

Now I suddenly owned two Macs! I thought as a bonus I could use it to write 800k floppies for the SE, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Those damn 800k drives. When I took the IIsi home and opened up to examine it, it’s clear somebody took very good care of it. Not only did it have the huge 1 GB replacement hard drive, all of the components were very clean. I found out later the logic board had been re-capped, had a new battery, and the guts of the power supply had been replaced with a PicoPSU adapter. Very nice.

The IIsi has been a blast to use, there’s just something nice about the System 7 interface. I maxed it out with 64 MB of RAM which seemed to help the speed a bit. It had copies of apps such as After Dark, Lemmings, Oregon Trail,  I was able to get some floppy disk images from sites such as Macintosh Garden to load on ZTerm, Network Software Installer, and a few other tools. Then I started copying larger files to the BBS and downloading them to the IIsi using a modem. Eventually my AAUI transceiver cable came in and I was finally able to hook up Ethernet.

My BlueSCSI finally came in last week, so now I’ve been able to make more progress with the SE. I’ve been able to get it online. I’ve been inside it once to check things out, it does not look like a trivial machine to take apart like the IIsi. Watching some videos it seems I’ll need to replace the battery on it and possibly recap it, and the seller’s tag noted the floppy drive worked but needed to be lubricated, so all that is probably up next for it.

One more thing

Then I got a Quadra 700. I knew about the whole Jurassic Park thing, and while I love that movie, that aspect didn’t really appeal to me. When I saw the 700 at VCF I thought it was the neatest mini-tower kind of case, smaller than a PC mini-tower even, it spoke to me. That beige, those lines in the case, and Apple rainbow apple on the front, mmmm. Then I found out they’re a big collectors item because of the whole said movie thing. Prices for previous eBay auctions were all over the place, some beat and yellowed to hell, some in mint condition, from a few hundred for parts chassis to well over $1k for fully kitted systems with the PowerPC card, and they seemed to come along once a month or so.

I set an email alert, not expecting to see a system come by for a long time. Then by sheer luck several days later I happened to be up late at night browsing eBay when a Quadra was added, it looked in decent shape so I jumped on it. This is gonna be another round of picking up the bits to build it up, so far I’m in the process of getting RAM, VRAM, a drive sled, and a hard drive.

Tandy CCR-82

[photos: flickr – Tandy CCR-82 tape recorder]

Between VCF West and the Electronics Flea Market I have been inundated with projects! I wasn’t intending to mess with cassette tape on the TRS-80, despite having a cassette of Talking Eliza. At VCF I ran across a Tandy tape recorder in good shape in a box for a great price, so sure why not. It had the original box, manual, packing material, and TRS-80 interface cable. We had one of these, I think an prior generation, once upon a time but I guess it got sold with our old Model 3.

I stuck new batteries in it, hit play and I could feel the motor turning but nothing. Opening it up it was immediately obvious what was wrong, the drive belts were completely stretched out and lost tension. Browsing Youtube for the CCR-82 I happened upon this one from ACs 8-Bit Zone where he replaces the belt and does some other troubleshooting, and I used it as my guide. Later I found Console5 sold a belt kit for the CCR-82 which I bought.

Console5 CCR-82 belt kit

I got all the bits and put it aside for a few weeks. I thought I’d make a repair view, but decided against it since one already existed. Finally tonight I dove in to trying to revive mine.

In AC’s video it shows disconnecting various wires from the PCB with a soldering iron to lift the PCB out of the way. I thought I could get away with doing this and was able to replace the third (counter) belt, but ran into problems with the middle drive belt. It had completely turned into an extremely sticky rubber string that I had to pick off bit by bit with tweezers, which got everywhere. I needed to get the PCB out of the way to clean things up more, fortunately it was just a few quick dabs with the iron to get the four wires loose.

I cleaned the gears up with 91% IPA and got the belts on without any issue. I cleaned up the old grease on all the mechanisms and put new silicone grease on, everything seemed tip top. I flipped it over and play/fast-forward/rewind all worked even with a tape but record was physically not working. Opening it back up and checking the release mechanism I realized the tape I had was write-protected, sticking some tape on the holes later, record worked!

Now I need to figure out how to make it work with the TRS-80. Fiddling around I found I had a version of BASIC that supported CLOAD/CSAVE. I could CSAVE a BASIC program to tape, play it back in all of its FM/MFM audio glory. But for some reason when I tried to CLOAD, I could hear something click inside the TRS-80, the tape would play for a second, stop and the prompt would return on the system. I don’t know if I’m not getting audio back to the computer or there’s some other reason it doesn’t seem to load completely.

This will be the next thing to figure out, but at least the tape recorder is finally working!

I was recently expanding my analog voice empire and noticed my Cisco ATA191 was blinking like it was rebooting, and coming back. Looking at logs it was indeed warm rebooting and SIP re-registering every few minutes. I ruled out a duplicate IP address, and it never missed a ping. I was wondering if the VoIP provider was having issues, or if adding a new extension somehow broke things, so I rolled back changes I made. After a few hours of maddening searching I saw link flaps on my switch and thought ah ha it’s just a flaky cable. No, shortly after fixing the cable the ATA still kept rebooting. My other ATAs like the Cisco SPA122 and Grandstream weren’t having problems and stayed registered the whole time.

In the debug logs on the ATA I’d see something like this, like something was happening to cause the unit to want to reboot. The “reboot reason 800000” and “reason 0x800000” looked interesting but I didn’t turn up any useful information. Had I had a support contract they could probably tell me quickly, but I’m on my own.

Jul 28 20:09:22 ata01 Network[468]: [netCtrl]: raMonitorMain(), send AUTO_CFG_CHANGE to WAN
Jul 28 20:09:22 ata01 [161241.038349] sysevt_comm_sendto: (54, rc)=>
Jul 28 20:09:22 ata01 System[468]: [rcDbg]==== event_process start-832 , module(wan_module, evid=0x702) ====
Jul 28 20:09:22 ata01 Network[468]: wan_event_process(1279)..recv AUTO_CFG_CHANGE...
Jul 28 20:09:23 ata01 Network[468]: [netCtrl]: runDhcpv6App(), infoOnly = 1, prefixLen = 64
Jul 28 20:09:23 ata01 System[468]: [rcDbg]==== event_process end-832 ====
...
Jul 28 20:09:25 ata01 vsock: nmlink_server_task(), message received: 14
Jul 28 20:09:25 ata01 vsock: nmlink_server_task(), voice app restart
Jul 28 20:09:25 ata01 vsock: system request reboot, type 1, reason 0x800000, graceful 0
Jul 28 20:09:25 ata01 vsock: [cc_pre_reboot_check]: NO CALL, send unregister here...
...
Jul 28 20:09:26 ata01 vsock: SIP_regTsEventProc(event: 28)
Jul 28 20:09:26 ata01 vsock: setRegState(), line{1} REG State(1->0) pCause=unREG
Jul 28 20:09:26 ata01 vsock: SIP_regTsEventProc(event: 32)
Jul 28 20:09:27 ata01 vsock: fpar2_update_flash() Finish SYS Saved, infoCnt=0 sysCnt=3
Jul 28 20:09:27 ata01 vsock: fpar2_update_flash() PAL-PARM Saved, pid=208, type=2, attr=0x0, name=SIP Reg Call ID State
Jul 28 20:09:28 ata01 vsock: fpar2_update_flash() Finish PAL Saved, palCnt=1 infoCnt=0 sysCnt=3
Jul 28 20:09:28 ata01 vsock: reboot_check(341), reboot reason 800000
Jul 28 20:09:29 ata01 vsock: hal_board_warm_reboot (145, tid=0xc47ff460) do system sync
Jul 28 20:09:29 ata01 vsock: SAFE_MON_main() ccTick:6266->6366, ccCnt=6146->0, monNum=2
Jul 28 20:09:30 ata01 vsock: hal_board_warm_reboot () fp-size=1048576 date=2024-07-28T20:09:28
Jul 28 20:09:30 ata01 vsock: hal_board_warm_reboot (163, tid=0xc47ff460) terminate VoIP service

The “AUTO_CFG_CHANGE” bit followed a dump of dhcpv6c details made me think something related to SLAAC, DHCPv6, router advertisements. Especially when I was watching the unit now reboot every 5 minutes now. I had just powered up a new, freshly wiped Cisco 2821 on my LAN with some basic IPv6 config and realized the thing must be sending out IPv6 RAs or maybe some sort of CallManager auto-provisioning thing the ATA was picking up on.

Logging into the Cisco I did a  ‘ipv6 nd ra suppress‘ on the interface plugged into my LAN. It’s not connected to anything else and therefore has no connectivity to offer. Lo and behold the auto reboots stopped!

It was only the Cisco ATA191 that had this problem. The Cisco SPA122 and Grandstream HT802 are on the same LAN and they had no problems at all. I have only one other router on this LAN, and it’s been speaking IPv6 for years just fine. The ATA is configured to get an IPv6 address from DHCPv6 along with a static list of DNS servers. (Now I remember the SPA122 is lame and doesn’t even support IPv6). I can reproduce this by re-enabling RAs on the Cisco and the problem with the ATA191 comes right back and starts warm rebooting again.

This feels like a bug, a device receiving two sets of RAs shouldn’t go janky like this. I dug into this for a while today doing some packet captures from the ATA’s switchport. I could see RAs from my normal router and the Cisco router on the wire, but nothing was really lining up time-wise with the log messages I was seeing. RAs might go by and then like 60-120 seconds later it decides to reboot itself. I can’t even come up with any off the cuff theories, it’s not like the Cisco was advertising anything crazy.

I stopped looking into this problem but maybe if somebody else stumbles upon this it’ll give them some insight to carry on and find a root cause. To be clear I am absolutely not advocating for disabling IPv6 here!

Cisco 2821 Noctua fan replacement

[photos: flickr – Cisco 2821 fan replacement]

I have both a Cisco 2921 and this Cisco 2821 to play with. The 2921 is considerably louder even at idle and not really suitable for my 24/7 homelab production. The 2821 is much quieter so I wanted to use it, but was still enough white noise to notice. If it had brand new fans it may have been quiet enough, but these were of 2005 vintage and had some noise to them. The existing fans were Delta AFB0812SH-F00R, 4000 RPM, 80 mm, 12 VDC, with a 3-pin connector.

Instead of just buying a set of the same OEM fans, I tried a set of Noctua NF-A8 FLX fans. I didn’t think I needed to go all the way to their ultra low noise versions, just some with a lower RPM. At first they didn’t work, then I noticed the red cable on the Delta fans was on the outside, and on the middle on the Noctua fans. Using a paperclip to push out the terminals, I re-arranged them with the red on the left, black in the middle, and yellow on the right. The fans worked, at full RPM.

IOS was cranky about it, repeatedly with %ENVMON-4-FAN_LOW_RPM in the logs and show environment reporting “Low RPM”.

vintage-gw2#show environment

 Main Power Supply is AC

 Fan 1 Low RPM
 Fan 2 Low RPM
 Fan 3 Low RPM

 Fan Speed Setting: Normal

 System Temperature: 29 Celsius (normal)

 Environmental information last updated 00:00:10 ago

The datasheet for the Delta fans shows the white cable is a tach / frequency generator output, and the Noctua fan also has a tach output. At idle the Delta fan was running around 2520 RPM. When I measured the Nocuta it was running at 1400 RPM, so this may be too low for what the router was expecting. I’ve seen on reddit other people have encountered this same problem with other Cisco routers, trying various wiring hacks, with no satisfactory solutions. It may need a circuit to artificially output double the frequency so the Cisco things it’s running faster, or just short the thing to 12 V and be done with it. At least here at home I don’t think it’s going to overheat.

7/29: Playing with my oscilloscope today, I see these kind of waveforms on the tach/fan speed pins of the Delta and Noctua fan. Also at boot the Cisco kicks the output voltage to 12 volt and then settles in around 7.2 volt at idle.

Delta fan tach pin output

Noctua speed output

Update 9/2:

If you get really fed up with the %ENVMON-4-FAN_LOW_RPM messages want want to yeet them into the void, hashtag YOLO, ignore all the consequences, you can set up a logging discriminator:

logging discriminator nolog msg-body drops Fan
logging buffered discriminator nolog 4096
logging console discriminator nolog
logging monitor discriminator nolog

Many years ago I was out of the country turning up a new site. Along with racks of servers we had a pair of cabinets shipped to us that contained Cisco 6509s, patch panels, with 300+ ports pre-mounted, pre-cabled, and tested from our main US site. This was a weeks long project and we were a couple of days from being completely done and going home, and the site was already taking some customer traffic. The company CEO stops by to check things out, barely looks at one of the 6509s and says “that’s mounted wrong”. We never noticed it, the group that originally racked it never noticed it, but indeed the rear of the 6509’s shelf was one bolt position too low. Not a RU low, just a half inch.

Some people strive for perfection, some people strive for done is good enough. Word came down we had to fix it. This would entail draining all the customer traffic (an 8-12 hour wait itself), unplug all 336 patch cables, fibers, de-rack the 6500, fix the shelf, and reinstall everything. This would have added a day to our trip at the least, provided nothing else went wrong in the process. My manager and I decided to take matters into our own hands.

We went out to our rental cars and got our jacks for changing flat tires. We stuck them under the back of the 6509, gently lifted up the chassis enough to unscrew and fix the supporting shelf (the chassis rack ears were still secure to the rack), and let it back down. While it was serving customer traffic. Problem was solved within an hour, we were very happy with ourselves.

Needless to say our bosses were not happy about our bit of improvisation. But it worked and not a packet was lost that day!

FreHD menu

I wound up buying a completed FreHD kit for the TRS-80 model 4, along with the self-booting EEPROM. FreHD is a TRS-80 hard drive emulator that plugs into the I/O connector on the bottom of the system. Normally the TRS-80 hard drives required a DOS to be loaded off of a floppy disk first, then the volumes were accessible. My floppy drives are still inoperable, so going this way lets me run programs on it in the meantime.

Installing the FreHD EEPROM

I didn’t realize it at the time but the EEPROM requires some wires to be soldered to it and to some spots on the system board. It works by replacing the casette BASIC ROM (U4) with the new EEPROM which contains the bootloader. I’m ok with soldering a little, but this required a couple of connectors to wee size pads on the circuit board. Fortunately nothing destructive like trace cutting needed to be done, so I was ok with trying it. God bless jeweler’s magnifying headsets, my eyes can’t see this tiny stuff well anymore. Fuck getting old.

I got it all together without any disaster:

Finished install

As I was getting ready to put things together I noticed the I/O edge connector isn’t keyed nor does it have any numbers. Which way does the ribbon cable connect? The manual’s schematics didn’t have any numbering either, but did show all the pins on one side were all connected to ground, and the pins on the other side were connected to other components. Looking at the system board, on the component side, there’s a trace that connects every pin. I finally concluded the “even” pins 2-50 are all the grounds, and “odd” pins 1-49 are signal. So, the leftmost is pin 1 and rightmost is pin 50.

I put the system board back in, buttoned things up and fired it up. After an initial reboot the FreHD LED lit up and the FreHD loader menu popped on the screen. Success! First try!

Learning TRS-80 software

The FreHD SD image comes with several instances of LS-DOS, CP/M, NEWDOS, and various utilities on them. After poking around at different games and programs, I realized the TRS-80 is a much more capable system than I remember. In fact I don’t know much at all about the platform. When I was a kid the extent of my usage was booting TRS-DOS, loading BASIC, going to a long sheet of paper that had a list of BASIC games that were copied from who knows where, LOADing them and running them. I wrote some little BASIC programs, that was about it. We didn’t have hardly any commercial titles, I think just Superscripsit, VisiCalc, and Chicken! (The Superscriptsit did have an audio tape tutorial that taught me about proportional fonts!)

Most importantly I’m happy the thing actually runs software without crashing. Other than the video RAM issue, so far I haven’t seen any corrupted RAM, janky video, janky keys, or lockups.

The games on the system were popular names, if not knockoffs of arcade games. Frogger, Missile Command, Moon Rover, Breakout, etc. They were not some public domain BASIC programs either, they were real titles with real graphics and gameplay. Funnily enough most TRS-80 software seems to have no concept of returning to DOS, you have to hit the o’ orange reset button to get out.

Modem on the TRS-80

I found a couple of comm utilities such as Modem-80 and FastTerm II on the system so of course I had to try hooking up a modem, in this case one of my USR Couriers. First thing I had to do was track down a set of gender changers to go from DB-25 off the TRS-80 to my various DB-9/DB-25 cables to the Courier. The first app I tried was Modem-80. At first I could tell from the LEDs it was communicating with the modem but it wasn’t returning anything. I rigged up a null modem cable to my laptop and verified I could send type stuff on one system and see it on the other. I finally realized the TRS-80 wasn’t raising DTR, so I flipped a DIP switch on the Courier to always assert DTR and I was able to speak to the modem. I don’t know if this was because I wasn’t using a DB-25 to DB-25 cable or not.

I ATDT’d the BBS, lo and behold I got the Wildcat! banner and my login screen!

Dialed up to my BBS with the TRS-80

The ANSI color and graphics understandably didn’t work, but the rest did. 9600 bps seemed to be a bit too fast for it to keep up with as it griped about overruns occasionally. I had problems getting my modems to run at 2400 bps, so I settled at 4800 bps and it was decent. FastTerm II looked interesting too, of note it supported the Ymodem protocol. I found out there are other terminal emulator programs that say they support ANSI something, I need to figure out how to copy them over to the FreHD SD card and see what they do.

Floppy drives still vex me

I thought I might be able to copy Floppy Doctor over to the SD card and use it to work on the floppy drives. Then I read the manual for it and apparently it was released on a self-booting disk that TRS-DOS couldn’t read. Then I just found what looks like maybe an older CMD version, so we’ll see.

With the system booted I tried accessing the TRS-DOS disk I made. The drive would spin and seeks a bit, pause, and then come back with some error like “No disk” or directory not found or something like that. I’m still pouring over the VCF forums for ideas what to try. One thing that looks promising is to write 0x2F to a known track and then use some BASIC to seek the drive to that track and try to read, which should help sort out if the read head even works or if it’s even remotely aligned. I got my oscilloscope the other day, so I’m eager to poke some digital signals!

I do want to get at least one floppy drive working, as I have a few dozen TRS-80 floppies I want to go through.

 

This is mainly a reminder for myself so I don’t forget what I did. When using Qodem in iTerm2 on my Mac along with a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard, the “Alt” key wasn’t working inside Qodem. It was impossible to “Alt-Z” to bring up the help, the dialer screen, or anything. I didn’t have this problem on my Macbook Pro. This is even after the standard swapping of Option and Command modifier keys in System Preferences. After much fiddling and even ssh’ing to/from my laptop to rule out anymore termcap issues like before, I finally figured out in iTerm2, going to Preferences, Profiles, Keys, General and changing “Right Option key” from “Normal” to “Esc+” fixed it. What’s even weirder is that I always use my left-hand modifiers to go into these menus and I have to select “right option key” from the list and not the left? Either way I don’t know what this does or why it matters, I just went with it.

Qodem for Mac (via Homebrew) disables serial port

Also Qodem installed from Homebrew disables the serial port. So if you want to use a real dial-up modem on your Mac, you gotta compile Qodem on your own. Fortunately it’s just a quick and easy ./configure ; make ; make install.  I didn’t see in the git blame for the brew recipe any particular reason for disabling serial support, so maybe I should send a PR for it.

Boooooo serial support disabled by default in Homebrew

ANSI escape bug in Qodem

Bonus: while on the subject of Qodem, I think this one is a straight up bug that I need to submit a patch for (is it even maintained though?). I was testing a new door game GuTTerBoWl and noticed under only Qodem it spewed ANSI escape sequences to the screen. Actual original QModem, SyncTERM, MuffinTerm, and even Minicom didn’t do this, and rendered it correctly. The door author says he didn’t do any changes to the ANSI handling in the door kit (Angel Doorkit v1.0), nor had they seen this sort of output before and I believe them.

GuTTeRBoWl in Qodem

After looking at a capture of the ANSI output I noticed sequences such as ^[1;37m rendered correctly, but all the ones with no number before the semi-colon were not escaped and just sent to the caller raw like ^[;34m. Looking up some info on ANSI escape sequences, after the ^[ you can specify a mode such as change foreground/background text color, intensity, or blinking. If there are multiple modes, you can separate them with semi-colons such as ^[1;37m or ^[1;15m;20. This particular door kit was omitting a number when I presume it meant 0 or to reset modes.

At least according to wiki, a missing number is presumed to be zero (good lord there’s even a whole ECMA spec for this stuff):

All common sequences just use the parameters as a series of semicolon-separated numbers such as 1;2;3. Missing numbers are treated as 0 (1;;3 acts like the middle number is 0, and no parameters at all in ESC[m acts like a 0 reset code). Some sequences (such as CUU) treat 0 as 1 in order to make missing parameters useful.[5]: F.4.2 

 

After figuring this out, it was pretty easy to reproduce this problem in Qodem:

Testing with and without mode numbers

This is what it’s supposed to look like:

GuTTeRBowl properly rendered in SyncTERM

Funny enough I ran a 1.5-something version of this game in 1995, I had forgotten all about it until the author released v4.00 last month.

The backup tapes live!

1995 backups

[photos: flickr – 1995 Tape backup pulls]

Data has been recovered from my 1995 backup tapes! After badly mangling one of my three QIC-80 backup tapes trying to repair it to make it readable, I gave up before I screwed them up even more. Finally a couple of weeks ago I contacted Dmitry Brant, who has experience with tapes, if he still did tape data recovery and he said he does. A few days after sending the tapes to him, he got back to me “with good news and not so good.” One tape had a broken tension band but otherwise good; the second tape had some damage and wrinkles where it jammed in my drive, but was able to recover almost everything; and the third tape that I had wrenched on was too far damaged (the header was too wrinkled) to be salvageable but yet still managed to get a few megabytes off of it.

All in all there was around 250 MB of data recovered. It looks like there was a couple of full-ish backups of my old BBS and Windows 3.11 system, along with several partial or incremental backups throughout 1994 and 1995. I spent several days combing through all the files and it was like a nicely preserved little 1995 time capsule. Among the files were the contents of 27 floppies for the Slackware Linux distribution in 1994, such as AP (apps), N (TCP/IP network), X/XAP/XV (XFree86 implementation of X Windows). I distinctly remember moving these to tape because they took up a lot of my hard drive space at the time. It’s not clear which version of Slackware these came from, but definitely 1994. This was the first Linux distro I used, I seem to recall it was using a pre-1.0 kernel like maybe 0.96 or 1.2.18. Or maybe it was Slackware 1.2.18?

I was most excited about the BBS files after recently re-scratching that itch. It was all there, Wildcat! 4, my ANSI screens, cringy bulletins and welcome messages I wrote when I was 15, a couple hundred files in the files repo, door programs, log files, everything. There were a few dozen off-line QWK message files from a few bulletin boards I frequented, with my cringy messages. Half the stuff I wrote sounds like I was on a sugar rush from Mountain Dew, which I probably was. My graphics collection, which consisted of a few dozen .PCX and .GIF files. Unfortunately I didn’t seem to have a full working backup of Windows, I would have liked to see what I had there.

The BBS was named after the very small town in Oklahoma that I lived in, with much irony. It didn’t really have much of a theme or niche, other than trying to provide some sales and technical information for my gig building/selling/repairing computers. Despite being in the middle of nowhere I did have a dozen or so regular callers, mainly other BBS friends from around the country.

Door menu

I don’t know what I was thinking with most of the door programs I was running, nobody wanted that stuff. Star Trek: TNG was all the rage then, on top of trivia doors I had a few oddball Enterprise and TNG graphics.

Upload scanner written in MS-DOS batch

I was really into writing MS-DOS batch files because I was too poor to buy anyone’s utilities. One thing I had written was a batch file that figured out the file extension of uploads, .ZIP, .ARJ, .EXE, .LHZ, .Z, and then called the right archive tool to unpack and inspect it. (Still looks legit today). Another was this complicated batch file upload and virus scanner which shot raw ANSI to the caller as it progressed. I seem to recall it worked but it was brittle to work on. Normal people just bought somebody else’s program for $25 or whatever to do this for them.

Mirror of Software Creations, Apogee, and Id shareware

LORD upgrade bulletin

My graphics collection wasn’t very large, and was mostly in the .PCX graphic format. I had just gotten a 1024 x 768 SVGA monitor and a Logitech handheld black and white scanner.

The very first .GIF file I ever downloaded!

.GIF files were also new and novel to me, 800 x 600 pixels! 256 color! Photorealistic! They really made that Trident video card pop with what it could do. It’s funny to me because around that time .GIF files were relatively large, probably took thousands of dollars worth of scanner and PC to create them, probably came from CompuServe or a large membership BBS that cost $25/month and $2/hour to access, on top of the phone bill. (And they were all probably scans of copyrighted stuff which got a lot of boards in trouble). Now we regularly encourage taking and throwing away 12 megapixel HDR movies.

A single 256-color 640 x 480 image may have ran around 256 kilobytes in size. With a 14.4k modem, it downloaded about 1,440 characters per second, that image would have taken 177 seconds, or a hair under 3 minutes to download!

320 x 200 GIF

800 x 600 x 256 color GIF

Rusty n Edie’s BBS ads featuring their cat

640 x 480 GIF

Also right around this exact same time (April 1995) the Oklahoma City bombing happened. I had a couple of .GIFs of the FBI sketches going around looking for suspects that I had downloaded a couple days after it happened.

Oklahoma City bombing suspects sketch

There were a few apps still intact, like NCSA Mosaic and Netscape 1.0! Mosaic was the first browser I used, both of these were pre-HTTP/1.1 and pre-Javascript.

NCSA Mosaic 2.0 alpha 7

Netscape v1.0

 

Overall I’m very excited about the haul. I had low expectations with the recovery effort, but thrilled data was salvaged from 29 years ago. I’ll probably go through and upload a lot of the original BBS file areas to my new BBS and otherwise make them accessible, as there’s quite a few vintage DOS/Windows 3.11 apps in there.

I moved my desk!

TL;DR so awesome, so much room for activities I should have done this years ago

This is such an exciting game-changing, lifestyle change! I moved my desk!

Ever since I moved in years ago into my small apartment my desk has always been in my bedroom, where in my place in Redmond it had been in a 2nd bedroom-turned-office. I think at the time I said I didn’t want the clutter of my desk in the living room, and I primarily used a laptop for everything, so to bedroom exile it went. Despite having my larger monitor(s) and an actual chair, I used my desktop setup less and less, only actually using it for doing photo imports. Even during COVID and the resulting work from home I continued to work from my couch and coffee table on laptops. I did not want to wake up, roll over to my computer, and stay in the same room all day long!

The problem was I wound up cluttering up a shelf and the corner of my living room anyways and all the computers made my bedroom hot in the summer, even with a window open. To the point I would turn off systems in ikeacluster and some nights sleep on the couch, where my A/C was located. It also turns out the cats’ litter boxes create a ton of clay dust so my electronics got absolutely filthy over time and required regular dust blasting and vacuuming.

I knew if I was going to continue to do any WFH I need to move my desk where it was usable and comfortable again. I procrastinated for months, dreading re-wiring everything, taking down my Internet connection, and having something inevitably failing during the process. Last week I finally sucked it up, took extra backups, moved the shelf into the bedroom and moved the desk and all the computers into the livingroom.

Before hooking everything up, I opened up the cases, stood in the doorway and gave them all a good air blasting. It kicked up so much dust I got three separate “smoke detected” warnings from my smoke detector! All of the hard drives survived, but the PSU in one of my Linux machines did smell like smoke and went to heaven when I flipped it on, as about I expected. Pro-tip: order spare power supplies for your weird size PC cases.

After getting everything back together, what a difference it made! I took out an Ikea chair I didn’t use, but it all freed up so much floor space in both the bedroom and livingroom! Somehow the new configuration just worked a lot better than I expected. I had room for an even bigger shelf in the bedroom which was satisfied by a trip to IKEA. The bedroom was immediately WAY cooler and dead silent now. The living room now gets noticeably warmer if I don’t have the balcony door open, but at least I have more options to deal with the heat and hopefully this means I don’t have to run my space heater so much in the winter. Now I’m getting around to adding some RGB rizz and vibes to the setup, because why not.

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